rspec-fire

Making your test doubles more resilient.

Once,
a younger brother came to him,
and asked,

"Father,
I have made and kept my little rule,
my fast,
my meditation and silence.
I strived to cleanse my heart of thoughts,
what more must I do?"

The elder rose up and,
stretched out his hands,
his fingers became like ten lamps ablaze.
He said,

"Why not be totally changed into fire?"

  -- Desert Way, Charlie Hunter

Test doubles are sweet for isolating your unit tests, but we lost something in the translation from typed languages. Ruby doesn't have a compiler that can verify the contracts being mocked out are indeed legit. This hurts larger refactorings, since you can totally change a collaborator --- renaming methods, changing the number of arguments --- and all the mocks that were standing in for it will keep pretending everything is ok.

rspec-fire mitigates that problem, with very little change to your existing coding style.

One solution would be to disallow stubbing of methods that don't exist. This is what mocha does with its Mocha::Configuration.prevent(:stubbing_non_existent_method) option. The downside is, you now have to load the collaborators/dependencies that you are mocking, which kind of defeats the purpose of isolated testing. Not ideal.

Another solution, that rspec-fire adopts, is a more relaxed version that only checks that the methods exist if the doubled class has already been loaded. No checking will happen when running the spec in isolation, but when run in the context of the full app (either as a full spec run or by explicitly preloading collaborators on the command line) a failure will be triggered if an invalid method is being stubbed.

Usage

It's a gem!

gem install rspec-fire

Bit of setup in your spec_helper.rb:

require 'rspec/fire'

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.include(RSpec::Fire)
end

Specify the class being doubled in your specs:

describe User, '#suspend!' do
  it 'sends a notification' do
    # Only this one line differs from how you write specs normally
    notifier = fire_double("EmailNotifier")

    notifier.should_receive(:notify).with("suspended as")

    user = User.new(notifier)
    user.suspend!
  end
end

Run your specs:

# Isolated, will pass always
rspec spec/user_spec.rb

# Will fail if EmailNotifier#notify method is not defined
rspec -Ilib/email_notifier.rb spec/user_spec.rb

Method presence/absence is checked, and if a with is provided then so is arity.

Protips

Using with an existing Rails project

Create a new file unit_helper.rb that does not require spec_helper.rb. Require this file where needed for isolated tests. To run an isolated spec in the context of your app:

rspec -rspec/spec_helper.rb spec/unit/my_spec.rb

Doubling class methods

Particularly handy for ActiveRecord finders. Use fire_class_double. If you dig into the code, you'll find you can create subclasses of FireDouble to check for any set of methods.

Mocking Done Right (tm)

• Only mock methods on collaborators, not the class under test.
• Only mock public methods.

If you can't meet these criteria, your object is probably violating SOLID principles and you should either refactor or use a non-isolated test.

Compatibility

Only RSpec 2 is supported. Tested on all the rubies thanks to Travis CI.

Developing

git clone https://github.com/xaviershay/rspec-fire.git
bundle install
bundle exec rake spec

Patches welcome! I won't merge anything that isn't spec'ed, but I can help you out with that if you are getting stuck.

Still need to support #stub_chain.

Status

rspec-fire is pretty new and not used widely. Yet.